Petra

July 15th, 2008 Palestine Monitor Office, Ramallah, the West Bank
Adam and I met Sean in front of the Damascus Gate on Thursday night and began the incredibly long walk to the Egged Bus Terminal on Jaffa Street. We planned on taking the midnight bus to Eilat, but once we arrived we found that the bus was already full and we were left stranded at the gate. Fortunately, we met a guy named David from Chicago who is studying for a portion of the summer at Hebrew University. A junior at Ohio State, he spent seven months working at a hostel in Amsterdam and two months working near the Canary Islands. He offered a place for us to stay, so we caught a taxi to the dormitories of the university on Mount Scopus. We sat around the kitchen table and told David about what we have doing. He hadn’t heard very much of the other perspective at all: during orientation for his studies, he was told not to travel in the Old City or East Jerusalem by himself. He had been in Israel for almost three weeks and had not yet been to Bethlehem.

We got very little sleep, waking up a little after 5 and returning to the bus station, buying tickets and hopping on the 7AM bus to Eilat. Four-and-a-half hour bus rides are not the most comfortable modes of transportation, but we got where we needed to go. I slept for part of the way and we had some interesting conversations with David about the situation here and about theology. David is a fairly conservative Christian and feels that people use what he called the “new” social justice/humanitarian Christianity to replace a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior.” I rarely understand what that last phrase means, which wasn’t even a part of Christian vernacular until the 19th century. For me, a personal relationship with Jesus is encountered when I follow him, and that is by serving others. I have heard people juxtapose “humanitarian efforts” with “the cause of Christ.” According to the dictionary, the word humanitarian means “pertaining to the saving of human lives or to the alleviation of suffering.” By that definition, the cause of Christ and humanitarian efforts are the same. That is the Gospel: the Good News that Jesus taught and lived was and is humanitarian. And now we will have the altar call and sing seventeen verses of “Just As I Am.”

We arrived in Eilat before noon and walked to the Shelter, a Christian youth hostel where some of David’s friends used to work. We were given directions and some suggestions about how much to pay before we hailed a taxi and drove to the Aqaba Border Crossing. I very much dislike this idea of paying a departure tax when you leave a country. We reluctantly forked over 55 shekels and entered the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan with no trouble. This was my second time to the country, the first being in 2001 when my family and I visited Petra. We met the friendliest taxi driver who took us into Aqaba and worked out an incredible deal so that we wouldn’t have to wait several hours for the bus. Another taxi got us to Petra in less than two hours for a great price. We were crammed very tightly, but the discomfort was worth it. The taxi took us to the Valentine Hostel in the town of Wadi Musa (“the Valley of Moses”), which sprung up because of the extreme amounts of tourists coming to Petra.

We decided not to stay in the hostel, opting instead to find a place to camp. We descended down the steep hill, buying a few groceries along the way. We came to the entrance of Petra and veered right, walking along a road that lined the park. The four of us left the road and began climbing. Massive boulders seemed to have been thrown together to form the landscape. We scaled the rock walls and scrambled over ledges, diving deeper and deeper into layers of stone. Eventually, we emerged onto a sloping rock face that fell away into the valley. The sun was starting to set between two peaks, so we decided to make camp there. The rays of light soon vanished over the mountains and we were left sitting on the rock tongue. We threw our sleeping bags down and fell asleep early, free of mosquitoes, surrounded by the wind and roofed in by the stars.

We made our way into Petra at around 8, entering the narrow corridor known as the Siq that led into the site.

July 16th, 2008 Hotel Nof Ginosar, Sea of Galilee, Israel
We could see a small sliver of sky above our heads, crammed between the edges of the high rock walls. After a kilometer, we turned a corner and, peeking from between the cracks, the Treasury came into view. This massive monument, originally built as a tomb for a Nabatean king, was carved out of the sandstone cliffs and almost glowed a faint red in the sunlight. Six columns, three on each side of the door into the small room, supported the artwork above, façades of sculpture nestled under ornate half-pediments and three-dimensional turrets. A stone urn sat high above the ground, pricked with holes from bullets. According to legend, the Egyptian pharaoh hid his treasure in the urn while pursuing the Israelites, and later people who believed the story attempted to break the gold free from its resting place by using their rifles. If none of this rings a bell, watch the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and you will be impressed.

We continued around the corner, splitting from the main path and hiking up to the High Place of Petra. An ancient sacrificial altar rose out of a field of stone that dramatically fell deep into the valley that rose once again into rounded peaks. The four of us were taking baths in our own sweat, so we sat down for a few minutes and drank some water while enjoying the view around us. Instead of hiking down the same path, we took a back road, which took us alongside a series of tombs. We came out near the magnificent Royal Tombs, which sat across the ravine from an 8,000-seat amphitheatre burrowed into the cliffs. The rooms inside the tombs, serving as mouths into the heart of the fiery stone, were ablaze with color: the walls and ceilings were streaked with red, white, and black.

A dirt road took us along a colonnaded street, passing by the Qasr al-Bint temple, one of the only free-standing buildings in Petra. We embarked on a long, hot hike up the eight hundred steps to the Monastery, or Al-Deir. The Monastery was similar in appearance to the Treasury, but, standing forty-five meters high and fifty meters wide, was much larger. Like many of the structures in Petra, Al-Deir was originally used as a tomb for a Nabatean king, but was later converted into a Byzantine church. We had our lunch of pita and an assortment of toppings sitting inside the huge entrance, raised a meter or so above the ground. We met a Mormon group studying Arabic in Amman and took some time to relax before making the descent into the valley.

We followed a small wadi far off the main path. Trees filled with pink flowers bordered the rocky trail that led down to a drying stream. We sat against some boulders beneath the shade of the trees and the shadows of the cliffs, talking for awhile. David seemed to struggle somewhat with some of our theological and political viewpoints. We talked more about what is essentially liberation theology and social justice. I think a lot of what we said was pretty new to him. Conversations like that can become rather frustrating, and sometimes a few of the people involved had a hard time maintaining a level of respect and humility. People won’t be transformed or opened to new worldviews if we attack them and beat them over the head with challenging ideas. Patience is certainly a difficult virtue, but a necessary one.

We returned to the wide road, passing the colonnaded street and wandering up an ashen hill to the Temple of the Winged Lions and a Byzantine church which housed what are quite possibly the world’s oldest Byzantine mosaics. We found our way back to the entrance and took more pictures of the famous Treasury before turning and exiting through the Siq. We spent almost nine hours in Petra.

We walked up to the Valentine Hostel and paid 6JD (Jordanian denar) for a spot on the roof and a huge buffet, which is a very good deal. We were able to shower and sit on the veranda that overlooked the wide valley down to Petra. We met Patrick the Canadian, who has been traveling for the last seven months, mostly living in India. A filmmaker, he was in the process of working on a doctoral thesis concerning humanism and postmodernity in contemporary media and entertainment. I liked it. We had some fantastic conversations about film and TV shows, the rampant sexuality and excessive violence, and the impact they had on culture at large. We told him about our experiences, and I think we changed some of his perspectives on American Christians. During his younger years, he said that he believed in Satan and smoked a lot of weed.
“Now,” Patrick said, “I am a humanist atheist.”

He had a lot of respect for religion and the good that is associated with it, and we spent some time talking about the mythology of religion and of the construction of the idea of God. He apologized a little for challenging our beliefs, but we told him we welcomed the discussion. Patrick told me that if I want to be a good writer, then I will have to question my beliefs. I agreed wholeheartedly.

“If we don’t question and challenge our faith, “I said, “then we don’t have faith. We don’t really believe if we don’t seek.”
We got along with Patrick very well.

The sun set through a deep orange sky while we ate from the extensive buffet, continuing to talk about film and literature and philosophers. As the light started to seep out of the sky, we decided to go into a little sitting room just off of the lobby and watch Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which they had on VHS. Watching that movie at Petra is probably one of the biggest clichés, but it was one cliché I was very happy to fulfill. I never get tired of Indiana Jones. Those are movies you watch to have fun and to enjoy the adventure and magic of film. One of the workers at the hostel said he has watched that movie every day for the past seven years. David asked him if he still liked it. He shrugged.
“Sometimes.”

Once the movie was over, we clambered up the stairs attached to the outside wall of the building and crawled into our sleeping bags, soon falling asleep after two long days of hiking and climbing.

We got up a little after 5 on Sunday morning, because we had a taxi that would take the four of us and Patrick back to Aqaba. We were quite literally stuffed inside: Patrick took the front seat, and the rest of us were jammed in the back, legs stuffed under our neighbor’s legs and our butts angled on the seat so we could all fit. Needless to say, the ride back was long and uncomfortable, but I managed to sleep some which made the whole ordeal seem shorter.

We had relatively little trouble crossing the border. My bag was checked (as usual) and we were on our way, returning to the bus station. David decided to hang out in Eilat for the day, so we said goodbye to him and sat next to the wall, waiting for our bus to Jerusalem at 11:30. Patrick sat with us before departing for Tel Aviv. The three of us had the entire back row of the bus to ourselves, so we stretched out and slept most of the trip back. We went straight to Bethlehem and walked up to Manger Square, waiting to meet the Awwads: they had invited us to eat dinner and stay the night at their home. They greeted us warmly and we picked up some falafel and pita and drove down to Beit Sahour.
“Welcome to my Paradise!” Mr. Awwad said enthusiastically as we entered the gate to their home.

We sat on the veranda, looking down into the valley. Mr. Awwad can trace his family back between seven and eight hundred years on this same plot of land. Their paradise was surrounded by fruit trees and gardens. Almost all of the food we were served was grown on their land. Apples, figs, grapes, and different kinds of vegetables were placed before us and all were incredibly delicious. The Awwads are deeply connected to their land.
“Believe me,” Mr. Awwad told us, “I am like a fish. If you take me out of the water, out of my land, I will die!”

They made us feel absolutely at home, ordering us to take showers (probably because of the smell) and gave us comfortable beds. We slept soundly that night.

Breakfast the next morning consisted of jams made from their fruit and we sipped tea on the porch. We said goodbye to Mrs. Awwad and Mr. Awwad drove us to the checkpoint, hugging us goodbye and imploring us to come back again someday. I know I will be back.

Once we arrived in Ramallah, we went to the flat and showered and changed before backtracking to the office. Adam went off to Salfit to say goodbye to all of his friends there. Berenice went to Nablus for the day and Sean and I stayed in the office until 5. We meandered to the flat and hung out for the rest of the night, watching some of the DVDs that Kirsty let us borrow. We turned in early.